YouSaid · the spoken record

Bart Gellman

lines on the record: 86
first: 2020-06-08
most recent: 2020-06-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right. So one of the terms that was used in the book, you were quoting someone, which was database of rune. It's creating a database. Could you talk about that? And then I would love your shift that, you know, the government was doing this, but the tech companies themselves all have this information, even if it's been sort of served up by consumers who know they're doing it, who know they're giving all this information. So talk a little bit about this idea of a database of rune, because I think people don't realize how much you can put together information to create, you know, to create a really problematic situation for a lot of people, secrets and different things that they want to keep confidential.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they can do that for criminal investigative purposes. So then you have a situation in which information has been collected without the normal Fourth Amendment protections and without the benefit of a warrant. And yet if they find evidence of a crime, they can use it. This is the kind of information that would be suppressed if they did this with the usual sort of domestic law enforcement means.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But once you collect them and you weren't aiming for them, you collected them incidentally, you get to keep that data. And in some cases, for example, the FBI can sort through it Look for Kara. Look for Bart inside”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that some surveillance, a substantial amount of U.S. intelligence collection is justified and necessary. And so you need to have the means of doing that. What especially bothered me, and then what I tried to explore in the book, is the idea of bulk surveillance, of collecting everything in order that you can find anything, rather than targeting surveillance at specific intelligence targets to begin with. Let me be clear about the reason. There is an important legal and operational concept in intelligence gathering that's called incidental collection. If you pull in a big bucket of information and it happens that there are Americans in there, that's not an accident because you know there are Americans swimming in that sea. It's not unexpected. It's not even undesired. But it has to be called incidental, which means you weren't aiming for them.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what do you think the impact of that was of them doing that, moving into encryption, moving into stronger encryption and different things they were doing? Because again, there does need to be some cooperative relationship between tech companies and the government, or maybe you don't think that at all.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you had Europeans, for example, starting to say, well, we're not going to allow use of American infrastructure if that's just going to be on the menu for the NSA. And so the companies had to make very strong indications, not just with words, but with deeds of their independence.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was badly hurt, and some of it may have been principle, some of it may have just been outraged that your own locks have been picked. And a big chunk of it, let's be honest, had to do with market imperatives. There was a lot of global outrage about NSA surveillance when these stories started breaking. The question was, can we trust Microsoft anymore to host our company cloud infrastructure? Can we trust Amazon? Can we trust Yahoo, Google it, and so forth? They were at very real risk of losing the biggest market they had for growth. Their presence in the US market for email, for cloud storage, for data infrastructure, they were pretty well saturated in this market. All their growth was going to be overseas.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So what do you think the impact was? I think it did. I think it led to them not paying as much attention to different things, not cooperating with the government on things like election interference and things like that. I don't know if you think that was the case, but the relationship was not irretrievably broken, but it was pretty broken at that time, as I recall.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, they were used to defending themselves in China and in infrastructure that touched China. They were not used to the idea of a global adversary that could intercept data on the private fiber that's going between their data centers. This is not the open internet. This is fiber optic cable that these companies buy or lease themselves. No other traffic travels on them. They were not used to those as being targets. And it changed the way they operated.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was also facing China, it was facing Iran, it was facing other countries which were already doing this to them in many states. Google had, it's Tussle and China earlier. Talk a little bit about that because they were used to having this, but not the US government, correct?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no reason to think that they were especially disturbed by it. But when they found out that the NSA was breaking in to another door of their house overseas and not telling them about it and just helping itself, that really pissed them off and it took them aback. And I think that was a big, big moment for tech. In fact, there were a number of top tech executives that were gathered, I'm told at a conference in China at the time that this story broke. And it was the talk of the conference and it was a defining moment. It was the moment that, first of all, they decided to take defensive countermeasures. And this was an extraordinary thing. You had for the first time American companies treating the American government as an adversary. Spending millions and millions of dollars to defend against U.S. government surveillance.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the tech companies all knew that the rules had changed and that the NSA could come to them. And give them 10,000 accounts and say, give me all the content of these accounts under authority of a federal judge. And they were comfortable enough with that. It was the force of law and they were doing it.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were back with Bart Gelman. He is a well-known journalist award-winning, and he's also the author of a new book called Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Bart, we were talking about schools of fish and what they're allowed. Let's be clear, they're not supposed to be taking surveilling Americans. But the Internet has provided the opportunity to do so, given that Americans are giving up all kinds of information to social networks or to Google or anybody else that they have relationships with. Talk a little bit about the impact on tech of what happened here, because I've always felt like Edward Snowden moment was the moment that the relationship, which has been close, closer than people realize, was quite hurt. And people in Silicon Valley, depending on which company it was, Twitter was more loud about it, but others, they all reacted with sort of shock. I was sort of surprised they didn't realize why wouldn't the government come fishing in their pond?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a fish named Bart. But you could just take a gigantic net and sweep in huge schools of fish. And then once you have those in your tank, you're allowed to look for bart inside there.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The NSA figured that out, and the NSA started breaking into those cloud infrastructures. And it was able to read data as it traveled from data center to data center. This is the same information that it was allowed to get with a warrant under quite easy circumstances using the PRISM program in the United States. And yet it was breaking in and doing it overseas. The important thing about these overseas operations was that they were capturing a huge amount of American data. They were capturing American accounts by at least the tens of millions because they can't help it. If you're sweeping in bulk, you're going to get a bunch of stuff that you want and a bunch of stuff that you didn't aim for on purpose. They weren't allowed to aim for Americans, but they were allowed to catch them. Once they had us in their net, they could use that information. So as though there was a rule that says, you can't fish out in the ocean.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Google and so on are global networks. And so the biggest story about this and the one that I think made the greatest impact on Silicon Valley was when Ashkhan and I wrote that the NSA was breaking into the Google and Yahoo and Microsoft Clouds. So they were already encrypting a great deal of what traveled across the internet. But eventually it would get to a data center. And maybe it's in Singapore. And at the data center, inside the private fiber that is bought or leased by a large company like Google, the data was traveling around unencrypted. It was naked.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became the bulk of my work writing this for the Washington Post, especially once I started partnering with Ashken Sultani, who's an independent security and privacy consultant. This was the bulk collection of content and metadata overseas. And it worked like this. They would go to a foreign access point and they'd say, give us everything that looks like a cell phone location. Give us everything that looks like a computer address book. And so on down the line. And the problem with that is they were allowed to presume that if they collected it overseas, the people they were collecting on were foreign. Well, that's just not true anymore. When I send an email from me to you, and we're both in the United States, there's a near 100% chance that a copy of that is going to either travel overseas or be backed up overseas”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Foreign intelligence surveillance judges who operated in closed session under classified rules with only the government as a party. In the past, the government had to get an individual warrant every time it did one of these things. The rules had changed in secret ways that no one knew about publicly, which enabled the government to give just a giant list of tens of thousands of what they call selectors, which is mostly email addresses. And they would all get sent at once to Google and Microsoft and they would have to produce en masse the contents of a high volume of counts. That was known as prison. That also became famous. The thing that did not get as much attention to my frustration was the”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the first of the disclosures made about Snowden, and that was by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian. And it was a very big deal. And it dominated the conversation because it was very clearly and unambiguously domestic surveillance. It was U.S. calls. It didn't matter whether you called. Overseas or called your next door neighbor, that was all being taken down. The second big one was a program called PRISM, and this one collected content. This one was the NSA asking large U.S. internet providers like Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on, for the content of accounts that they would name. And unlike previous lawful programs, which required individual warrants in every case, in which the NSA would have to go to a FISA judge, a special foreign intelligence.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a view on that. I'll get to it pretty quickly. There are two things that dominated the debate in terms of Snowden's disclosures. The first was the monitoring of call data records, the metadata of U.S. telephone calls. Every call in the country that it could reach, the NSA, with the help of the FBI and the help of the phone companies, was collecting who you called, who called you, what time, how long you talked, and other metadata like that. And you put that together in sufficiently large quantities and you have a social network. Yeah. You are able to find out everyone's relationship to everyone else in the country.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So talk a little bit about that because I know Silicon Valley was super freaked out and they should, I can ever tell whether they were surprised or not really surprised and were feigning sort of shock and disgust at what the government was doing.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explain for people who don't, I still think the noise around Snowden is less about what he revealed and more about what he did and how he did it. But please talk about what you thought was the most profound parts of that.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, so much of it was a surprise. Some of it was. Long feared or suspected or believed and there were tech people for years who said, well, a sufficiently well resourced adversary could do the following kinds of things on the internet if it wanted to listen in on everyone. And so, and there were people who built tools like the Tor Anonymity Network to get around that sort of thing. But there was granular detail here that went beyond anything that had been publicly known before and certainly that had been publicly confirmed. Frankly had kind of a freak out when I first understood how big and broad and sensitive the archive was that Snowden had given me.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so talk about sort of what happened then because these are these questions, because one of the things you did was you talk about what he unveiled and from your perspective, what it meant at the time, because you had been writing about this, this idea of the government doing much more domestic surveillance than you thought. Was this surprising to you when you finally saw the documents that he put out?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she was getting sick of it. That was actually how we first met when she came to me for advice about how she could protect herself during inspections like that. And she vouched for me with Snowden. But Snowden decided ultimately that having someone from a sort of brand name mainstream news organization would be helpful if it worked out. He wasn't sure whether the Washington Post or I would have the nerve to publish stories that the government didn't want published. I thought that was a profound misunderstanding of who we are and what we do, but that was his belief. His belief was that we would be intimidated. But he figured if it worked, it would work. And if not, he had the other two.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not his first choice. He wanted strong advocates of his position. He wanted strong skeptics of the National Security State. Glenn Greenwald had already made his reputation like that. He was a combatant from the left in public opinion. Laura had been personally picked on by the surveillance state because she was after making one of her films. She was stopped at the U.S. border every time she passed through for special secondary inspection. They would copy her computer. They would copy the files off of her SD cards and her video files and so forth.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plausibility to it. And so we tested it. And that went back and forth for quite a while. In fact, there was a mutual vetting going on with Snowden trying to decide whether he could trust a representative of the mainstream media, of which I was a card-carrying member. And me trying to figure out whether he really actually knew anything and whether he could provide evidence for the claims he made. All right. So you're doing this. And he was, that was one part of the book is him deciding whether he trusted you. He did trust Laura and Glenn, but you were something different. Explain that because it's a really interesting question of where he wanted this to go out to, where he wanted this information to be revealed in. Because he wanted the stature of a mainstream media organization so it would have some heft, presumably. Well, it was lucky for me that he chose three journalists because I was”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has unusual power over disturbed minds. Right, it does. Then there would be people who were just fakers or who thought they had a scandal, but it wasn't for real or they didn't understand the subject at all. And so the noise to signal ratio on tips of this kind is terrible. Yeah, I remember in the Washington Post newsroom where I was there at night, people would call and say that the CIO was invading their brain and they needed to wear all kinds of stuff. But you'd get all that. That was one of the biggest series of tips that came in was the intelligence agency is spying on me, really, essentially. And most people were mentally disturbed, but you just never know, correct? That's the kind of thing that you have to deal with when you're in this line of reporting. You never know. There are sometimes when I feel like I can discard something after the first communication. This one showed some intellect and had a veneer of play.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“time except he's living in Russian is considered a traitor talk a little bit about what you thought because you probably get these kind of tips all the time because you work in intelligence well to be honest my very first thought was oh no not this again because after I wrote about surveillance in the Washington Post and in my book I was getting an inbox full of crazy people who imagined conspiracies by the intelligence community. It's a subject that”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she wanted to know if this looked like it was for real. That started a long collaboration with Laura that brought us to the first story in June about the PRISM program of the NSA. All right. So PRISM, explain for me, because what happened was that Edward Snowden, and we did an interview earlier this year when his book came out about it was a program that the government had that was a surveillance program that was doing different things. And Edward was working in the NSA as a contractor, and he had moved different places, including Hawaii, I think is where he was the last part of his career, is that correct? Right, Hawaii. Yeah. And so he then became disturbed, and he's a really interesting personality. I want to get into this later with you because I think you depict him rather well, sort of a righteous person and also arrogant, very typical of techies. He reminded me so much of people I cover all this.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real time look at several days in a Hong Kong hotel room with Snowden when he was revealing, when he was bringing these documents to their attention, her and Glenn Greenwald. Right. It's with Glenn Greenwald in the room. Laura and I had been fellows together at NYU. She knew me. I had given her advice on encryption and that sort of thing. She came to me one day in January of 2013 and asked me to meet in some very private place and she didn't like the first one I picked so we picked another one. She didn't want me to take notes. She wanted to tell me about This anonymous source who had made contact with her claiming to be someone from the intelligence community claiming to have a big scandal”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disclosed during the Bush administration. It was known internally as the vice president's special program. And it turned out to be one of the four programs of domestic surveillance that Snowden helped to disclose. Because I'd written about that, Laura Portress approached me in 2013, just after an anonymous source named Verax made contact with her. Explain who she is. She is a she works for. Lord Portress is a fantastic independent filmmaker who has made a number of documentaries that she shoots by herself, produces by herself, and she's done them on Gitmo, on Iraq, and the very good Citizen 4, which is a kind of”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But go ahead, keep going. I remember you in the newsroom. Yeah. I came back. I covered the Pentagon and Diplomacy and moved into a kind of an investigative seat where I did nothing but long-term projects in the newsroom. And after 9-11, it became pretty much nothing but national security all the time. My series on Dick Cheney and my book on Cheney focused heavily on the national security issues and had two chapters on the warrantless surveillance of Americans that was”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I joined the Washington Post when I was a baby. I covered courthouse State Department, and I was a foreign correspondent in the Mideast.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk a little bit about your background because I think I'd love for people to get sort of a setup of how you got to be writing about Edward Snowden and that story. It's in the book and everything, but I think a lot of people don't know it. So it would be great if you could sort of give us the sort of short version of how you got to where you got to write this book.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone who wants to ask Edward Stowden for advice on how never to travel anywhere these days. In my spare time, I'm just a reporter, and you're listening to Reco Decode, a podcast about power change and the people you need to know. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair, I'm thrilled to have Bart Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Amy-winning journalist, an author who writes for the Atlantic. He previously wrote a book about Dick Cheney's vice presidency called Angler, and his brand new book is called Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden, and the American Surveillance State. Bart was very involved when those first stories were reported, and he's going to talk about that and more. We're recording this on May 13th, less than a week before the book comes out, and there's all kinds of issues around surveillance and other issues that I'm excited to talk to him about. Bart, welcome to Rico Deco.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT